Mask of Memory : White Racial Fantasy After the Civil War

Many of the sights and sounds that Americans associate with slavery are rooted in a grandiose historical myth. The image of the Big House, sitting atop carefully manicured rolling green hills, is in large part, a fantasy—as is the idea of the plantation as an expansive family home to chivalrous planters and content slaves. Still, these myths persist.

Jason R. Young explores the persistence of these myths and the historical memory of slavery by focusing on the elite white mythmakers who helped shape our understanding of slavery. In the early twentieth century, a group of white writers, artists, and performers from the cultural hub of Charleston, South Carolina, created and curated a highly sanitized view of slavery. They imagined a once and future plantation society that would reestablish them as the proper heirs of the slave past. In the process, they crafted a set of dangerously durable and virulent stereotypes about slavery. Focusing on literature, art, and performance, Young examines both the power and the folly of these ideas. In uncovering their origins, The Mask of Memory resists these racial fantasies and challenges their stubborn resurgence in our own time.

Jason R. Young is professor of history at the University of Michigan.